The city does not sleep. Not really. Beneath its layered skin of steel, glass, and fog, Draekall twitches with something unspoken: nerves wound tight around silence, corners too sharp to be forgotten. The East Platform murder was supposed to be a solitary ripple in the noise, an anomaly explained away by an overworked constable or a disappearing file. But days later, another body turns up. And this time, no one can pretend it was not deliberate.
It is colder. Not just the weather: something else. The kind of cold that creeps under nails and between thought, that lives in the space between camera frames. The second body is found outside the university's perimeter, slumped beneath a broken transit sign near Carvel Row. Nothing about it makes sense.
Erian does not seek out the scene: he stumbles into it. A misdirected tram stop, a strange line in a message from Dr. Mire, and suddenly he is there, boots crunching over broken tile and glass. MK-A units have sealed the outer layer, but their presence is thin. The air is heavy. The crowd less curious, more subdued. Something in the atmosphere resists casual scrutiny.
And then there is the body.
Victim appears to be early thirties, possibly a researcher or faculty member: no ID, no wallet. Only a neatly folded piece of thick paper tucked under his palm, and a strange smell clinging to the clothes: ozone, mixed with something faintly metallic. His jaw is locked mid-scream, though no visible trauma exists on the outside. It is what has drawn the few officers back twice already.
Erian notices the paper immediately. Another spiral. But it is not a copy of the first: this one is embedded with something else. A strange layering, almost like a cipher. Behind the shape lies faint mathematical notation: nonlinear recursive equations, hints of calculus. It is messy. Like someone scribbled over a formula mid-proof. Like a mind unraveling through math.
He photographs it carefully, marking angles, symbols, and strange indentations pressed into the fibers. The numbers are not just random: they look like partial derivatives over time, drawn with too much pressure in some places, as if urgency affected the pen strokes. His architecture notes come back instinctively: spatial memory, latent topology: but this is deeper. Something else is buried in the spiral's math. He sees something fractal in its edges. A design meant not just to be seen, but to be solved.
Nearby, a chemical analysis drone buzzes faintly. Erian overhears bits of data from the forensic team. Trace compounds on the victim's coat: silver nitrate, low concentrations of trinitrobenzene, and something anomalous: carbon structures that do not match any commercial polymer. It is not something you spill in a lab. It is synthesized. Deliberate.
He texts Rhett and Nina, who meet him twenty minutes later, breathless from dodging curfew restrictions. Nina clutches her satchel tight, half-convinced they will get detained. Rhett seems less phased, scanning the perimeter for places to hide if needed.
"What are you doing here?" Nina whispers sharply.
"I did not know I would end up here. I thought it was a mistake. Then I saw… that."
He shows them the spiral. Nina frowns. "That's not just a drawing. Those are partial integrals."
"You know that?" Rhett raises an eyebrow.
"She got a math minor. Before she realized she hated calculators."
"I do not hate calculators. I hate what people do with them," she mutters.
Erian flips the page over. On the back, a message burned faintly into the paper: "Your hands have already touched the solution. All you need is light."
"What does that mean?" Rhett asks.
Erian does not answer. He is thinking of the way sunlight passed through his sketchbook that morning, of how the ink looked different depending on the angle. Invisible ink. UV-reactive, maybe. He could test it back at the flat.
But another thought gnaws at him. This is not random. These messages: this murder: they are orchestrated. Deliberate, yes, but personal too. And whoever left them wants him to solve something more than just the killing. They are constructing a framework, like an architect guiding someone through a space designed not with walls, but with ideas. With loops.
Later that night, Erian returns home and begins to examine the spiral under different spectrums: flashlight, candlelight, even his phone's camera filter. At a sharp angle, tiny blue fibers emerge from the page, forming a faint grid beneath the spiral's lines. It is not a drawing. It is a map.
He overlays it with the first spiral from the East Platform.
The patterns do not align perfectly: but when placed together, certain intersections click. The two spirals overlap just enough to form what appears to be a star-like structure at the center. An asterisk in the middle of two looping systems. A key?
Erian scribbles notes furiously. He does not hear the knock at the door. Does not notice the sound of heavy breathing outside his window.
Only when the power flickers: once, then again: does he look up.
There is something etched into the condensation on the glass from outside. A new spiral. But this one is not drawn in ink or scratched by hand.
It is burned.
The second body at Carvel Row had been a stark contrast to the chaotic spectacle of the East Platform. Here, the air hummed with a different kind of silence: a profound, almost reverent hush that seemed to absorb the city's omnipresent noise. No frantic media crews jostled for angles, no throngs of morbidly curious students pushed against the MK-A tape. The scene was oddly sterile, as if the murder itself had been carefully excised from public consciousness. It was unsettling, the quiet efficiency of it all, a subtle horror beneath the surface of Draekall's indifference.
Erian had stumbled into it, drawn by a misdirected tram and a cryptic line in a message from Dr. Mire. He found himself standing amidst broken tiles and shattered glass, the faint scent of ozone clinging to the chill air. The MK-A units, usually a suffocating presence, were conspicuously sparse, their cold, metallic forms barely visible beyond the perimeter. It was as if this particular tragedy was meant to be overlooked, a secret whispered only to those who knew how to listen.
His gaze had snagged on it almost immediately: a spiral, not drawn in ink this time, but laser-burned with surgical precision into the crumbling brick of a nearby wall. It glowed faintly, a malevolent scar against the weathered surface, radiating a silent, impossible heat. It was a twin to the one found on the victim, but amplified, more profound. His breath caught in his throat. This was not a random act of violence. This was a deliberate message, etched into the very fabric of the city.
He moved closer, drawn by an irresistible pull. His eyes, trained by years of architectural observation, scanned the ground near the slumped body. Beneath a partially dislodged, broken tile, something caught his attention: a glint of unnatural darkness. He knelt, pretending to tie a loose shoelace, his fingers expertly nudging the tile aside. There it was: a slab of what looked like obsidian, roughly the size of his palm, sitting nestled in the damp earth. It was cold, heavy, and absorbed the faint light of the dawn, giving off no reflection. It felt… ancient. Alien.
A low, mechanical hum sounded behind him. An MK-A unit, its optical sensors glowing, was slowly advancing. Erian straightened, his heart pounding, the slab already concealed in his coat pocket. He needed a cover. Fast.
"Architecture consultant," he stated, his voice surprisingly steady, a practiced confidence in his tone. He pulled out his university ID, flipping it to show his student information, then quickly tucking it away before the unit could fully scan it. "Campus survey. The damage here is… significant. Structural integrity check."
The MK-A unit paused, its blue sensors focusing on him. He felt a fleeting moment of pure terror, expecting a challenge, an accusation. But the unit merely tilted its head slightly, then resumed its patrol, its metallic footsteps receding into the quiet. It was a hollow victory, a bluff that had worked, but it left him shaken. He had lied to a machine, to the city's silent enforcers, and gotten away with it. But the chilling truth was that the entity leaving these spirals, the entity he was now pursuing, seemed to orchestrate these anomalies with a chilling precision. He had the slab. He had the second spiral. He had to get back to his flat.
The familiar sanctuary of Erian's flat felt different now, tinged with the lingering cold of Carvel Row and the unsettling weight of the obsidian slab in his pocket. He stripped off his coat, letting it fall forgotten to the floor, and pulled out the stone. It sat in his palm, a dense, matte black, absorbing all light, reflecting nothing. It was cold to the touch, heavy beyond its size, and almost seemed to hum with a silent, internal energy. It felt less like a rock and more like a captured fragment of absolute night. The surface was smooth, yet somehow infinitely complex under his fingertips, hinting at hidden depths that defied simple tactile understanding.
He took it to his desk, placing it beneath the harsh glare of his architect's lamp. No reflection. No gleam. It simply sat there, a void. He tried different light sources: his phone's camera flash, the soft glow of his bedside lamp, even the flickering beam of a forensic light wand Nina had left behind months ago. Still nothing. The surface remained an impenetrable, light-devouring abyss. His frustration mounted, a sharp, cold knot tightening in his chest. He was missing something. A crucial piece of Mire's elusive puzzle.
"All you need is light." Mire's words echoed in his mind, a ghostly whisper from the lecture hall. But what kind of light? He had tried every visible spectrum. This stone, this void in his palm, seemed to mock his conventional understanding of illumination. He leaned back in his chair, rubbing his temples, the dull ache behind his eyes a testament to sleepless nights and a mind pushed to its limits. His gaze drifted to the Carvel Row spiral, the one with its intricate mathematical notation: nonlinear recurrence relations, incomplete derivatives. He remembered the hidden blue fibers he had found on the first note, visible only at a sharp angle, with the right filter. He needed a different angle. A different spectrum. A different way of seeing.
A sudden flicker of an idea, tenuous yet persistent, sparked in his exhausted mind. An old, experimental infra-red filter he had built for a university project, designed to reveal hidden structural weaknesses in ancient building materials. It was a clumsy, makeshift device, forgotten in a box of discarded tools and circuit boards. He had almost thrown it out a dozen times. Now, it felt like a lifeline. He rummaged through the dusty box, his fingers brushing against cold metal and brittle plastic, finally unearthing the tangled wires and lenses. He attached it to his phone's camera, the device suddenly feeling like a relic from another, more innocent life, repurposed for a terrifying new reality.
He held the phone over the obsidian, its infra-red filter activating, painting the room in shades of muted, ghostly light, stripping away the vibrant hues of his apartment, leaving behind a stark, spectral landscape. He lowered it, focusing on the slab. And then, there they were. Faintly at first, like ghostly etchings emerging from the void: recursive spirals etched into its surface. They were almost translucent, glowing with a dull, purplish light, visible only in the infrared spectrum. He gasped, a thrill of terror and discovery shooting through him, a strange admixture of dread and exhilaration. The air around the slab seemed to shimmer, as if reality itself was bending under the weight of what he was perceiving.
He rotated the slab, adjusting the angle of his phone, meticulously searching for clearer lines, for a deeper understanding. The spirals shifted, not merely changing perspective, but seeming to shift into three dimensions, their curves and loops receding and advancing, creating an optical illusion that defied the flat plane of the stone. It was as if he was looking into a miniature, self-contained universe, spiraling inwards towards an infinite point, a cosmic drain drawing his consciousness along its vortex. His architectural mind, accustomed to the rigid logic of blueprints and load-bearing structures, wrestled with this impossible geometry. These were not mere carvings; they were dynamic structures, living algorithms.
He recognized the symbols then: not just abstract shapes, but advanced mathematical equations. His eyes, despite their exhaustion, devoured the alien script. He saw fragments of nonlinear recurrence relations, complex numerical sequences that described systems sensitive to initial conditions, where tiny changes could lead to wildly divergent outcomes. These were the equations of chaos, of unpredictable growth, of systems on the verge of breakdown. There were incomplete derivatives, hints of calculus that seemed to describe states of flux, of processes caught mid-transformation, of an entity in perpetual becoming or perpetual decay. Some of them eerie mirrored spatial modeling equations from his architecture courses, the same underlying principles of structure and form, but they were undeniably far more complex, dealing with concepts of non-Euclidean geometry, with dimensions beyond the conventional X, Y, Z. It was like seeing the scaffolding of reality itself, laid bare by an unknown hand, a secret language written in light and shadow, waiting for a translator.
This was not just a symbol or a map; it was a living algorithm, a dynamic key, encoded within the very fabric of the obsidian.
He pulled out the spiral note he had retrieved from the East Platform murder scene, the one he had already mapped with its hidden blue grid. He laid it flat on his desk next to the obsidian slab, the infra-red filter still active on his phone. He aligned the physical note with the spectral image on the slab, painstakingly rotating and resizing until their central points converged. His hands trembled slightly, a nervous energy buzzing through him.
A faint shiver ran through him. They aligned. Not just roughly, but with an uncanny precision, at specific angular intervals, almost as if they were dancing to an invisible rhythm, guided by a hidden conductor. He recognized the underlying pattern now, not just abstractly, but as an undeniable signature: the Fibonacci sequence, nature's own ubiquitous blueprint for growth and recursion. It was a numerical sequence where each number was the sum of the two preceding ones (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc.), often found in the spirals of seashells, the branching of trees, the very architecture of existence itself. The spirals were not just symbols; they were expressions of fundamental mathematical laws, laws that seemed to govern both biological growth and something far more abstract: information itself, the chaotic flow of memory and consciousness within a sentient entity.
He quickly transferred the data from his phone to his main workstation, initiating a sophisticated 3D mapping program he usually reserved for complex urban planning simulations, now repurposed for a task far beyond its original design. He fed in the coordinates, the angular alignments, the mathematical parameters gleaned from the slab and the notes. The program whirred, processing the intricate data, its fans humming a strained, desperate tune against the deepening silence of the apartment.
On his large monitor, a distorted version of Draekall began to take shape. It was a topographic map, but warped, twisted into a non-Euclidean projection, as if viewed through a funhouse mirror. Streets bent impossibly, buildings stretched and compressed, familiar landmarks appearing in unexpected places, their spatial relationships dissolving into abstract concepts. It was a map of Draekall, yes, but not the Draekall he knew. It was a Draekall warped by something other than physical space, a Draekall shaped by… what? Time? Consciousness? The city's fragmented memories?
His gaze snagged on a particular feature, a profound anomaly that pulsed like a silent wound: a large, empty zone near the campus. It was a void, a blank space where buildings and streets should have been, a spatial anomaly that defied the physical laws of his world. But there was no such empty zone on any public map of Draekall. It simply did not exist in the official, observable city. This was a place, or perhaps a concept of a place, hidden from the public eye. A restricted zone. A forgotten zone. A suppressed memory, actively erased from the city's official record.
As he tried to zoom in on the anomaly, the entire display became unstable. The numbers on the side of the screen flickered wildly, dissolving into gibberish. Data points vanished in silent, digital blips, entire sections of the warped map dissolving into static. His mapping program stuttered, then crashed, its screens going black. He tried to restart it, but the data vanished from his screen, replaced by a cascading torrent of error messages, then an absolute, terrifying blankness. His heart hammered in his chest, a frantic drum against his ribs. It was like the file itself was fighting back, resisting his attempt to unravel its secrets, protecting its own hidden truths with a digital ferocity.
He pounded the desk, a frustrated growl escaping his lips, a raw sound of helplessness against an unseen enemy. Then he stopped, his gaze snagging on a faint, almost imperceptible trace of a message on his screen, just before the complete digital collapse. He had only seen it for a split second, a ghostly afterimage, but his memory, sharpened by the crisis, had captured it. He had copied part of it, a sliver of the data, a fragment saved to his secure drive just before the system purged itself, a desperate act of preservation. It was partial, corrupted, but it was something. A thread, a clue, a tiny piece of the impossible puzzle.
He leaned back, exhausted, staring at the blank screen, the cold obsidian still in his hand. He understood now, with a chilling certainty, the true nature of what he held. The spiral used math functions tied to chaotic memory structures, functions like logistic maps, which described population growth where slight variations led to unpredictable, chaotic patterns, where order dissolved into self-replicating confusion. This was not merely mapping space; it was mapping memory, mapping consciousness, mapping the chaotic, unpredictable flow of information within a sentient entity.
And the obsidian itself was not just a rock. Under the microscopic lens he had from a past project, a forgotten tool now vital, he had seen it: not crystalline structure, but complex carbon nano-helix lattices, impossibly intricate, impossibly precise. They were woven together at a molecular level, too perfect, too structured to be anything but synthesized. They were silent testament to a technology far beyond human comprehension. They were detectable by micro-Raman spectroscopy, a technique that analyzed molecular vibrations, revealing their manufactured, non-organic nature. This was a piece of advanced, alien technology, disguised as stone, hidden in plain sight.
And its most terrifying property: it behaved as a quantum object. He had seen it. He had experienced it. Two spirals existed, overlaid, seemingly distinct, yet connected by an unseen, impossible bond. They were in different time frames, one a ghost, one a present reality, their temporal existences overlapping and intertwining. And interacting with one, observing it, attempting to unravel its secrets, caused a perceptual bleed from the other. The flickering lights, the vanishing data, the warped map: these were not glitches. They were echoes, ripples in time and perception, warnings from a reality he was only just beginning to comprehend, a reality that was actively responding to his probing. He was not just observing a mystery. He was interfering with it, bending reality simply by looking, simply by understanding.
The phone rang, a sudden, jarring intrusion that shattered the suffocating silence of the flat. Erian jumped, adrenaline surging through him. He looked at the caller ID. Nina. His friend. He knew then what he had to do. He could not keep this to himself. The burden was too heavy, the implications too vast. He needed her mind, her intuition, her surprising grasp of complex mathematics. He needed her to see what he was seeing, to share the impossible burden, to help him make sense of the chaos. He needed her to believe him.
Nina arrived a whirlwind of nervous energy and barely contained curiosity, her usual academic composure momentarily ruffled by the urgency of Erian's cryptic summons. Her dark hair, usually meticulously braided, was escaping its confines in rebellious tendrils, and her eyes, usually sharp with intellectual focus, darted around Erian's cluttered flat with a mix of apprehension and intrigue. The lingering scent of ozone, a phantom presence in the apartment, only heightened her unease.
"Your message was cryptic, even for you, Erian," she said, her voice low, a whisper of concern that softened the sharp edge of her inquiry. She dropped her satchel onto the floor with a soft thud, a familiar sound in their shared, chaotic lives. From its depths, she pulled out a bizarre contraption: a makeshift device built from old spectrometer parts and a forensic light wand, jury-rigged with a tangle of wires and flickering indicator lights. It looked like something stolen from a mad scientist's lab and then lovingly reassembled by a curious child, yet in Nina's capable hands, it pulsed with a quiet, undeniable power. "Is this about the Carvel Row incident? The news has been strangely quiet. Too quiet."
Erian nodded, his gaze fixed on the device, a strange mix of relief and dread settling in his chest. "It's about that, and more. Much more." He gestured to the obsidian slab on his desk, the East Platform spiral note, and the ominous, faintly glowing red spiral from Mire's office, which he had retrieved from the hidden compartment after the power had stabilized. "And this. All of this."
Nina's eyes widened, a flicker of professional fascination replacing her apprehension. She approached the desk cautiously, her brow furrowed in intense concentration, her usual academic skepticism at war with the undeniable strangeness before her. She picked up the obsidian, turning it over in her hands, her fingers tracing its matte surface, her expression morphing from curiosity to a profound sense of awe. "This… this is unlike anything I've ever felt. It's… dense. And cold. But also… vibrant." She paused, then aimed her light wand at it, sweeping its beam across the surface. Her initial awe dissolved into frustration. "My optical scanner isn't registering a normal refractive index. What is this, Erian?"
"It's the key," Erian murmured, his voice tight, infused with a tremor of fear and a strange, desperate hope. "To everything. I think." He launched into a rushed, almost incoherent torrent of words, trying to convey the impossible: what he had discovered with his infra-red filter, the recursive spirals, the shifting 3D perspectives, the chilling Fibonacci alignments, the warped Draekall map, the terrifying experience of the disappearing data. He watched her face, searching for skepticism, for disbelief, for the mocking laugh he half-expected. But found only a growing intensity, a deepening curiosity, and an unsettling understanding in her dark eyes.
"Show me," she said, her voice firm, stripped of its earlier nervousness, now purely scientific focus. She set down the obsidian, activated her spectrometer device, and connected it to his workstation, her movements precise and confident. "I've got some new software builds for multi-spectral analysis. If there are hidden layers, if there's a pattern of information, we'll find them. Together."
They worked in a tense, shared silence, the only sounds the soft hum of Nina's device and the rhythmic click of her fingers on his keyboard. Nina's analytical mind, a perfect foil to Erian's intuitive perception, meticulously calibrated her makeshift spectrometer. Her software, a tangle of custom algorithms and open-source hacks she had meticulously crafted over years, began to process the data from the obsidian and the two spiral notes. The air in the room grew thick with anticipation.
On the main monitor, the spirals from the slab began to resolve, not just as flat images, but as intricate, multiple spiral overlays compressed into dimensional layers. It was like looking at a geological cross-section of information, each layer a distinct yet interconnected pattern, shimmering with its own faint, internal light. "It's like a hard drive of memories," Nina whispered, her voice tinged with awe, a breathy reverence. "Each layer encoding a different set of data. This isn't just a map, Erian. It's an archive. A vast, living repository of… something."
They watched, mesmerized and terrified, as the software drilled deeper, peeling back layer after impossible layer. Some areas began to show 'temporal depth'. Not just spatial coordinates, but temporal ones. Not just where something happened, but when, and even how it felt. Events seemingly encoded into the spiral's angles. Flickering images, vague and ephemeral, like glimpses of a distant, fragmented dream: a man standing in the rain, whispering about invisible chains; a flicker of a neon sign from an unfamiliar district, its light distorted; a blurred face, consumed by shadow, etched with an eternal scream. It was chaotic, nonsensical, yet terrifyingly real, bleeding into their own perception like a contagion.
"It's like… psychometry," Erian breathed, recalling a forgotten academic text on parapsychology he had once skimmed, a dismissal now replaced by dawning horror. "Like the stone is holding echoes of past events. Or memories from a collective mind."
Nina nodded slowly, her eyes wide, reflecting the shimmering spirals on the screen. "Or projecting them. This isn't just recording. It's… active. It's interacting with us. Responding to our presence." She paused, a profound unease settling on her features. "It's like… the city is remembering through us."
As the software continued to decrypt the labyrinthine layers, a series of subtle, unsettling events began to occur around them, invading the mundane reality of Erian's apartment. The very fabric of their world began to shift slightly. A ceramic mug on his desk, previously stationary, rolled uphill with a soft, impossible clatter, stopping precisely at the edge of his lamp, as if drawn by an unseen, inverted gravity. The ambient light in the room, usually stable, began to refract incorrectly, casting distorted shadows, bending around objects in impossible ways, painting the familiar room in alien hues. A framed photograph on his shelf, a casual shot of him and Rhett at a campus festival, seemed to shimmer, its colors briefly inverting, their smiles twisting into grimaces.
And then, the most disturbing phenomenon: time seemed to "skip" frames. A sudden, jarring lurch, like a projector skipping a slide, a film reel caught and then released. A brief, unsettling discontinuity in perception, a blink that lasted too long, a moment lost. Erian blinked, disoriented, his mind struggling to reconcile the impossible. He swore Nina had been reaching for the mouse, but suddenly her hand was already resting on it, her movement having instantly concluded. The world stuttered, caught in a temporal hiccup.
Nina gasped, her face pale, her usual scientific detachment replaced by a visible, raw terror. "Did you see that?" she whispered, her voice tight with a mixture of fear and profound fascination. "The cup… the light… the skip. It's… it's a recursive loop. We're caught in a feedback system." She looked at him, her eyes searching his for confirmation that she wasn't losing her mind, that this shared impossibility was real.
"I did," Erian confirmed, a cold knot forming in his stomach. The quantum behavior Mire had hinted at, the perceptual bleed, the temporal shifts, were no longer just theories. They were invading their reality, bleeding through the membrane of normal existence.
"The math… on the spirals," Nina murmured, her gaze returning to the complex equations now visible on the screen, interwoven with the temporal layers, their alien symbols now pulsating with a faint, internal life. "It directly resembles models used in studying memory loss or psychological feedback loops. Recurrence relations that describe information decay, or the way thoughts can become trapped in infinite, self-referential cycles. Like a mind… spiraling into itself." She looked from the screen to the obsidian, then back to Erian, her expression grim, a profound understanding dawning in her eyes. "This isn't just about the city's history. It's about the city's mind. And it's… unraveling. Or perhaps… awakening in a way we can't comprehend."
A sudden, desperate thought seized Erian, overriding his fear with a frantic urgency. If this was a memory archive, a living mind, then perhaps by fully mapping it, by creating a comprehensive 3D model, they could stabilize it, understand its chaos, bring order to its impossible logic. He moved to his workstation, overriding Nina's analysis, his fingers flying across the keyboard with a desperate hope. He initiated a full 3D scan sequence, attempting to scan the entire spiral into a 3D model, to capture every layer, every temporal event, every piece of encoded memory, to contain the chaos within the rigid framework of his architectural software.
The room immediately responded. The air grew thick, heavy with an unseen pressure, as if the very atmosphere was resisting his attempt to impose order. The ambient light in the flat began to fade, slowly, inexorably, plunging them into a deepening twilight despite the time of day, as if the apartment itself was being consumed by the encroaching shadows. The hum of his workstation intensified, becoming a strained, grinding whine, like a beast in agony. His monitor glitched, its display fracturing into a mosaic of distorted colors, then dissolving into a chaotic storm of static.
And then, terror. The spiral image began overwriting his files. Not just the mapping program, but every document, every project, every personal file, every digital vestige of his life. His screen became a cascading waterfall of spirals, replacing his neatly organized folders and subdirectories with its endless recursion. One particular folder, his personal archive of family photos, the last tangible link to a life he barely remembered, replaced itself with repeating filenames: a single, chilling phrase, burning itself into his vision.
"YOU REMEMBER. YOU REMEMBER. YOU REMEMBER."
The words pulsed on the screen, glowing with an internal, malevolent light, filling the fading room, echoing in the terrified silence. The spiral on the screen seemed to expand, reaching out, pulling them into its infinite recursion, consuming his digital existence, his very sense of self. The air grew cold, bone-chilling, and the subtle shifts in reality intensified. The floor beneath them seemed to buckle, the walls to shimmer, as if the very fabric of their world was unraveling, becoming one with the chaotic memory structures encoded within the obsidian.
Nina screamed, a sharp, terrified sound that sliced through the oppressive silence, tearing at the fabric of Erian's dazed horror. She lunged, grabbing Erian's arm, her grip vise-like, her nails digging into his skin. "Erian, stop it! Shut it down! It's consuming everything! It's going to erase us!" Her voice was raw with fear, tinged with a desperate urgency that finally broke Erian's trance.
Erian stared, mesmerized and horrified, at the words on the screen, at the encroaching chaos, at the relentless, suffocating repetition. You Remember. It was not a question. It was a command. A message directly to him, from the city, or from the entity controlling it, pulling him deeper into its labyrinthine mind. This was beyond science, beyond understanding. This was an invasion, a psychic assault. He slammed his hand down on the power button, plunging the workstation into darkness, but the words, the spirals, the chilling sense of being watched, remained seared into his mind's eye.
The café felt like an island of mundane reality in the surging, chaotic sea of Erian's escalating nightmare. Its fluorescent lights hummed a weary tune, casting a flat, unflattering glow on the chipped ceramic mugs and the stale pastries that sat, uneaten, on the small table. Erian sat opposite Detective Harrow, the table between them a thin, fragile barrier against the burgeoning strangeness of his life. He had reached out to Harrow on a desperate impulse, a last resort. He trusted the detective's weary pragmatism, his grounded skepticism, as an anchor against the rising tide of the impossible. He needed someone, anyone, to confirm that he was not losing his mind.
Harrow looked even more tired than usual, deeper lines etched around his eyes, like ancient rivers carving paths through a landscape of exhaustion. He sipped his lukewarm synth-coffee, the ceramic cup held tight in his large hands, his gaze distant, as if still grappling with invisible demons that haunted his own sleepless nights. He had agreed to meet Erian after a brief, terse phone call, his voice tinged with a new, unsettling urgency that resonated with Erian's own growing dread.
"I've reviewed both cases," Harrow began, his voice a low rumble, devoid of its usual dismissive edge, replaced by a quiet gravity. He placed a thick, redacted file on the table between them, its sterile cover a stark contrast to the chaos Erian carried in his mind, the chaos he now carried in his very perception. "East Platform. Carvel Row. I'm willing to admit… something isn't right. Not by a long shot. And my gut, which has seen too much in this city, is screaming."
Erian felt a flicker of hope, a fragile sense of validation, like a tiny ember in a vast, cold darkness. "What have you found, Detective? What made you… change your mind?"
Harrow pushed the file forward, its pages rustling softly, like secrets whispering in the quiet cafe. "The first victim, East Platform. Forensics report came back… clean. Too clean. Like it was scrubbed. No blood loss, which is impossible for a fall from that height. The ground was dry. But the autopsy report detailed something else. There was significant neural degradation. Like the brain collapsed inward. Not physically, not a hemorrhage. More like… a implosion of the neural pathways. As if all the connections, all the memories, just… dissolved." He rubbed his temple, a gesture of profound weariness, a man grappling with something that defied the logic of his profession. "The second body, Carvel Row, the one you… stumbled upon." A faint, knowing look crossed his face, a flicker of suspicion that quickly faded, replaced by concern. "Same neural degradation. But worse. More complete. And something else. Carbon crystal deposits inside the lungs. Tiny, almost microscopic. Not dust. Not inhaled. Synthesized, the lab techs said, baffled. Like they grew there, inside him. Like some alien plant taking root."
Erian felt a cold dread settle in his stomach, a familiar chill that now accompanied every new piece of information. He remembered the anomalous carbon structures Mire had mentioned, the ones found on the Carvel Row victim. The carbon nano-helix lattices he had glimpsed within the obsidian. They were undeniably connected. The evidence was mounting, building a horrifying picture.
"The lab couldn't identify them," Harrow continued, his voice grim, his gaze fixed on the blank wall opposite them, avoiding Erian's intense stare. "Nothing on file matches. But they're… structured. Like tiny, intricate circuits. Almost like… an organic chip." He trailed off, shaking his head, as if dismissing an impossible thought, yet the words hung in the air, resonating with terrifying clarity. "My gut tells me this pattern is not physical. It's… mnemonic. Like their minds were the targets. Or the weapons. Like something was siphoning their thoughts, their very consciousness."
Erian stared at the detective, a profound sense of relief washing over him, mixing with a growing terror. Harrow saw it too. He wasn't crazy. This wasn't just a hallucination. The impossible was becoming undeniably real. He pulled out his own meticulously prepared notes from his sketchbook: the sketches of the two spirals, the original East Platform one, and the more complex Carvel Row one with its cryptic equations. He had carefully re-copied the mathematical equations he had gleaned from the obsidian, ensuring they were precise. He had also brought a partial, hand-drawn map of the warped Draekall he had copied before his system crashed, a fragile piece of evidence against a world gone mad.
He pushed them across the table, laying them out carefully, like a hand of cards in a desperate game. "I think you're right, Detective. It's mnemonic. And I think these are the patterns. These are the blueprints." He explained, as calmly and coherently as he could, the spiral theory he had developed: how the spirals were not just symbols, but complex mathematical keys, encoding information about the city's consciousness, its hidden memories. He showed him the distorted map of Draekall, pointing out the non-Euclidean projection, the impossible shifts in topography, and the large, empty zone near the campus. He withheld the information about the quantum behavior of the obsidian, the time skips, the "YOU REMEMBER" message, the direct psychic assault. He needed Harrow to believe him, not to think he was delusional. Not yet. He needed a partner in this madness, not a therapist.
Harrow picked up the sketches, turning them over, his brow furrowed in intense concentration. He traced the lines of the spirals with a calloused finger, his gaze lingering on the distorted map, a map that showed a Draekall he did not recognize, yet intuitively felt was true. He said nothing for a long moment, the silence punctuated only by the distant hum of city traffic outside the cafe window. Erian held his breath, waiting for the dismissal, the skeptical laugh, the return to mundane logic.
Then, Harrow looked up, his eyes sharp, focused, no longer tired, but alight with a grim understanding. "That empty zone," he said, his voice low, almost a whisper, a sound of dawning horror. "Near the university. Is it… precise? Are those coordinates exact?"
Erian nodded, a profound sense of foreboding settling in his chest. "To the millimeter. It's a void on the map, but it's anchored to a specific set of coordinates relative to the campus perimeter. A black hole in the city's fabric."
Harrow leaned forward, his voice dropping further, his gaze sweeping the sparse cafe, as if ensuring they weren't being overheard by unseen ears. His eyes, usually so weary, were now alight with a chilling knowledge. "I think I know what that is. It's a restricted zone beneath Virehill. A sealed corridor system from before the Fall. It was originally part of the university's underground network, a forgotten labyrinth of utility tunnels and steam pipes, but it was then expanded, retrofitted. For research."
Erian's breath hitched. "Research? What kind of research, Detective?"
"Cognitive research lab," Harrow replied, his voice grim, each word a hammer blow of revelation. "Top secret. Experimental. They were supposedly working on… advanced neural interfaces. Ways to accelerate learning, enhance memory, even… transfer consciousness. They were trying to map the human mind, to turn thought into pure data." He paused, a shiver running through his broad frame. "But it was shut down abruptly, during the chaos of the Fall. Officially, a structural collapse. Unofficially, there were rumors. Dark whispers of a containment breach. Something went wrong. Catastrophically wrong. And the project was buried, its existence erased from all public records."
The words hung in the air, heavy with unspoken dread. Containment breach. The neural degradation. The mnemonic patterns. The warped map of the city's mind. It all clicked into place, a horrifying puzzle finally revealing its true, terrifying image. Draekall was not just alive; it was a vast, sentient experiment gone awry, its consciousness now bleeding into the city, calling out for someone to listen.
"The spirals," Erian whispered, his gaze fixed on Harrow, pleading for confirmation, for shared understanding. "They're not just mapping the city. They're mapping that. They're leading us to it. To the source."
Harrow looked at the spirals, then at Erian, a weary resignation settling over his features, a profound sadness in his eyes. "Then we need to go there. You and me. First light tomorrow. I'll make the arrangements. I'll pull strings, call in favors, bypass every layer of bureaucracy this city has. But Erian… this is beyond anything I've ever encountered. This is beyond anything I was trained for. Are you sure you're ready for what we might find in the heart of that silence?"
Erian looked down at the spirals, at the intricate mathematical equations that had invaded his life, consuming his thoughts, his sleep, reshaping his very perception of reality. He felt the phantom hum of the obsidian in his pocket, a silent promise of deeper truths, a terrifying echo of a living city. He was terrified, a cold knot of fear twisting in his stomach. But he was also inexplicably, irrevocably drawn, pulled by an irresistible force towards the heart of the mystery. He looked up, meeting Harrow's gaze, his own eyes burning with a desperate, unwavering resolve. "I don't think I have a choice, Detective. I think it's already found me. And it's not letting go."
The descent into the disused entry point felt like stepping into the city's forgotten lungs, a slow, deliberate suffocation of the familiar world. Harrow's contacts, shadowy figures operating in the forgotten corners of Draekall's bureaucracy, had provided the access codes to a long-sealed maintenance hatch beneath a dilapidated storage facility, miles from the main university campus. The air grew progressively colder, heavier, clinging to Erian's clothes with a damp, ancient chill that seeped into his bones. Harrow led the way, his heavy flashlight beam cutting a tentative path through the oppressive gloom, illuminating crumbling concrete and rusted pipes that snaked like metallic veins through the subterranean labyrinth. The usual distant rumble of Draekall's traffic, the omnipresent hum of its electrical grids, the faint whispers of a city that never truly slept, slowly faded, replaced by an eerie, profound quiet. It was not just an absence of sound, but an active, consuming silence that seemed to press in on them from all sides, a silence that felt heavy with untold secrets.
Erian clutched his backpack, the weight of the obsidian and his deciphered notes a constant, chilling presence against his spine. He tried to focus on the objective: finding the sealed corridor, the heart of the cognitive research lab, the genesis of the mnemonic patterns, the source of the unraveling. But his senses were overwhelmed by the oppressive atmosphere, by the sheer, tangible weight of the unseen. He could feel the pervasive energy Mire had described, the city's consciousness, humming beneath his feet, now amplified by their descent into its hidden core, a silent frequency resonating within his very being.
Harrow, ever the pragmatist, ever reliant on the tangible tools of his trade, was checking his equipment with a grim determination. He tried to raise a signal on his comms unit. Nothing. Only static, a persistent hiss of electronic despair. He tried his portable GPS. The screen flickered, then went blank, its digital display dissolving into nothingness. He tried his compass, a small, battered device that had seen a thousand crime scenes. The needle spun wildly, twirling in frantic, impossible circles, then froze, pointing in no discernible direction, mocking the very concept of north. "Damn it," he muttered, a rare flicker of raw unease crossing his stoic features. "Dead zone. Something's jamming everything down here. Completely blind."
Erian knew it was not just jamming. It was the effect of being so deep within Draekall's active consciousness, the quantum bleed intensified by their proximity to the source. The instruments were not merely failing; they were being overwhelmed, their rigid logic unable to cope with the non-Euclidean reality seeping into their physical space, the very laws of physics bending around them. The silence was not empty; it was filled with the silent roar of an awakened city.
They navigated through a maze of dimly lit passages, the air growing thick with dust and the pervasive scent of damp earth, ozone, and something else, something metallic and acrid, disturbingly familiar from the murder scenes, like the metallic tang of burnt circuitry and raw, exposed memory. Erian's stomach clenched. They were getting closer. He could feel it, a resonance within him, a pull towards the heart of the enigma.
Finally, they reached it: a solid, reinforced steel door, unlike any other in the aging tunnel system. It was smooth, unmarred by rust or time, a black monolith against the crumbling brickwork, but clearly, undeniably, rusted shut, sealed by untold years and forgotten protocols. A faint, almost imperceptible shimmer pulsed around its edges, like heat rising from an invisible fire, betraying a hidden energy. This was it: the entrance to the cognitive research lab, the source of the containment breach, the crucible where Draekall's consciousness had been forged and then suppressed. The air around the door was noticeably colder, carrying a faint whisper of… something. Something ancient, something hungry, something profoundly alien.
As they approached, Erian noticed them: faint spirals burned into the walls surrounding the sealed door. They were not drawn in ink or soot, no human touch could create such perfection. They were oxidized metal, a chemical reaction, etched into the steel by an impossible heat, just like the spiral at Carvel Row, a signature of the unseen force. They pulsed with a faint, internal luminescence, mirroring the patterns Erian had discovered on the obsidian, now humming with a quiet intensity. They were not just symbols; they were living circuits, conduits of a hidden power.
He reached into his pocket, pulling out the obsidian slab. It was no longer cold. It was humming, a low, resonant thrum that vibrated through his fingers, a silent call and response to the spirals on the wall, a tuning fork resonating with an impossible frequency. The stone began to grow warmer, pulsating with its own faint, purplish light, its internal energy bleeding into the cold, dark tunnel.
He looked at Harrow, whose face was grim, a mask of grim determination, his hand resting on the holstered weapon at his hip. The detective's eyes, though wide with wonder, were resolute. "This is it, Detective," Erian murmured, his voice tight with anticipation and fear. "The source."
Erian approached the wall, the obsidian radiating a growing warmth, almost painful against his palm. He saw it: a shallow, perfectly formed depression in the surface of the steel, just to the left of the sealed door, almost invisible to the naked eye, designed to go unnoticed by any casual observer. It was exactly the size and shape of the obsidian slab, a custom fit, a keyhole waiting for its key.
He took a deep breath, his heart pounding a frantic rhythm against his ribs. He had no idea what he was about to unleash, what forces he was about to disturb. But he knew, with an unshakable certainty, that this was the next step. This was what the spirals had been guiding him to. He gently places the slab against the wall.
It fit perfectly, sliding into the depression with a soft, almost magnetic click. The hum intensified, a deep, resonant vibration that filled the tunnel, making the very air tremble, making his teeth ache. The spirals burned into the steel walls flared with renewed intensity, their purple glow momentarily blinding. The light from the slab expanded, engulfing the entire door in a soft, purplish luminescence, illuminating the ancient, rust-bound surface.
The wall pulses once. A deep, internal tremor, reverberating through the rock beneath their feet, through their very bones, as if the entire structure was taking a breath.
Then, a faint, metallic groan, a sound of immense, ancient weight shifting. A thin, almost invisible crack appears down the middle of the reinforced steel door, bisecting it from top to bottom, like a fault line appearing in solid rock. It widened, slowly, agonizingly, with a grinding sound of protesting metal, revealing a deeper, more profound darkness within, a void that seemed to swallow all light.
The light flickers. Not just the light from the slab, but the emergency lights in the tunnel itself, stuttering, dying, plunging them into near-total darkness, then flaring back to life with a blinding intensity, only to die again in a maddening, disorienting rhythm. The slab glows, its purplish light intensifying, spilling out into the tunnel, illuminating the widening crack in the door, its luminescence a beacon into the unknown.
Harrow, reacting instinctively, draws his weapon, its metallic click echoing loudly in the sudden, disorienting silence. He pointed it at the gaping darkness within the door, his face a mask of grim determination, prepared for any threat, for any monster that might emerge from the depths. They had expected an attack, a guardian, a physical manifestation of the containment breach, a creature born of suppressed consciousness.
But nothing attacks. No monster. No creature of flesh and blood. Instead, they see…
The light from the glowing obsidian slab, now firmly pressed into the open threshold, pulsed with an almost reverent purplish hue, revealing not a physical threat, but a breathtaking, impossible space. Behind the wall was a vault-like room, immense and silent, its scale dwarfing the narrow tunnel they had just navigated, its ceiling lost in shadow. The air inside hummed with a palpable energy, a silent symphony of ancient information, thick with the scent of ozone and something akin to crystallized thought.
The walls were covered in spiral patterns, not burned or etched, but seemingly woven into the very material of the chamber itself, glowing with a soft, shifting luminescence, their curves and loops creating a mesmerizing, almost hypnotic effect. They seemed to breathe, contracting and expanding with a silent rhythm. Interspersed among them were chalk diagrams, intricate and flowing, depicting concepts that defied conventional geometry, and half-finished equations, scrawled in an ancient hand, their symbols alien yet strangely familiar to Erian's now-awakened perception. It was a space consecrated to knowledge, a library of consciousness, a vast, complex brain rendered in stone and light.
And in the center of the room, defying gravity, floating within a shimmering field of pure, white light, was a suspended architectural model of Draekall. It was not made of steel or concrete, not even from the ethereal light of the spirals, but seemed to be sculpted from pure emotion, its form fluid, ethereal, constantly shifting. The buildings within the model were not shaped by brick and mortar, but by emotion. A towering spire representing collective hope, its light burning brightest; a sprawling network of low-lying structures embodying shared fear, their shadows deepest; a pulsing, organic mass that vibrated with forgotten joy, a shimmering, golden hue. They pulsed faintly, each structure a living, breathing entity, connected by an unseen network of shimmering threads, a literal cityscape of the soul.
Harrow, weapon still in hand, approached the model cautiously, his eyes wide with a mixture of awe and disbelief, his usual stoicism momentarily shattered. He reached out, his fingers trembling, and gently touched the model, his calloused hand brushing against the ephemeral surface of solidified emotion.
A pulse hit him. Not a physical shock, but a wave of pure, unfiltered memory, vast and overwhelming. His eyes rolled back in his head, his body stiffened, and he collapsed briefly, falling to his knees with a muffled groan, a sound ripped from the depths of his being. Erian rushed to his side, fear gripping him, a cold knot in his stomach.
"Detective! Are you alright? What happened?"
Harrow gasped, clutching his head, his face pale, beaded with sweat, his eyes wide and unfocused, glazed with a terrifying vision. "The first victim…" he whispered, his voice hoarse, disbelieving, barely audible over the hum of the chamber. "I saw him. He was… alive. Standing in the rain. Just before he fell. He was whispering. Whispering about memory cages and spirals that eat time. He was trying to warn me." He shuddered, a deep, full-body tremor, as if the memories themselves were tearing through his consciousness. "He was afraid. So afraid. Of the whispers. Of the hungry spirals. They wanted… his memories."
Erian stared at the detective, a chilling realization dawning on him, a truth so profound it made his blood run cold. This room was not just a lab. It was a memory archive. A living, sentient library of Draekall's collective unconscious. The city was not just a vast construct; it was mapped psychologically, its very existence a living construct tied to collective consciousness. The victims were not just people; they were anchors, focal points, their minds integral to the functioning of this vast, psychic architecture. Their memories were not just stolen; they were devoured. And the spirals… they were not just mapping pathways; they were consuming them. Eating time. Devouring memories. Not just individual memories, but the very fabric of Draekall's past, its identity.
The obsidian slab, still pressed into the opening, began to shimmer violently, its purplish glow flickering erratically. The air thickened, and a faint, high-pitched whine filled the chamber, building to an unbearable crescendo. With a sudden, sharp crack, like a bone snapping, the slab dislodged from the wall, falling to the ground with a soft thud. Erian watched in horror as it shattered, breaking into countless gleaming fragments that scattered across the floor, their light dying, leaving behind only the dull blackness of shattered stone. The connection was severed.
But inside it, nestled among the broken pieces, was something else. A smaller, perfectly formed object. A second spiral, not etched or burned, but hand-carved from a material even darker and denser than the obsidian, a material that seemed to absorb all light, becoming an absolute void. It pulsed with a faint, steady light, not purplish like the obsidian, but a deep, resonant green, a stark contrast to the red spiral Erian had retrieved from Mire's office. It was a core, a heart, a deeper layer of the mystery, a nucleus of raw, unadulterated consciousness.
Erian knelt, his fingers trembling, and picked up the small, green-glowing spiral. It was warm, alive, humming with a power that resonated deep within his own consciousness, a silent call and response to the vast, living architecture surrounding them. This was a deeper key, a more ancient secret, a fragment of Draekall's primal memory. He held it tightly, its weight a profound burden, its silent hum a terrifying promise.
A shrill, insistent crackle tore through the eerie silence of the memory chamber, ripping them from the profound depths of Draekall's psyche. Harrow's comms unit, previously defunct, had suddenly burst to life, spitting static and fragmented voices, a jarring return to the chaotic, mundane reality of the city above. The sudden intrusion of the outside world, raw and violent, jolted them from their trance, pulling them back from the precipice of impossible knowledge.
"—repeat, all units to Sector Gamma-Seven, immediate response—unconfirmed reports of a third incident—body unaccounted for—stand by for details—possible containment breach at local perimeter… static… threat level elevated to…" The voice cut out, dissolving back into a hiss of white noise.
Harrow snapped out of his daze, pushing himself up from the floor, his face pale, beaded with sweat, but his eyes now sharp with renewed urgency, the trauma of the memory chamber replaced by the immediate demands of his duty. He grabbed his comms unit, shouting into it, his voice rough with exhaustion and fear. "Harrow here! What's the situation in Gamma-Seven? Repeat, what's gone missing? Give me details, now!"
The voice on the other end was strained, bordering on panicked, a desperate plea for order in a world rapidly descending into chaos. "—Detective, it's… it's a mess. Near the old clock tower district. A civilian. The body is gone, sir. Vanished. Completely. But the pattern… it's there. A spiral. Drawn in the victim's blood. And the scent… ozone. The same as the others."
Erian felt a cold wave wash over him, colder than the air in the chamber, colder than the shattered obsidian beneath his feet. A third victim. Not just murdered, but vanished. The body gone. Erased. And the spiral, drawn in blood, a more explicit, more visceral message than ever before. The Censors were escalating. Or perhaps, the city itself was becoming more desperate, its communications more brutal.
The ancient energy of the memory chamber began to wane, the glowing architectural model of Draekall pulsing erratically before dimming to a faint flicker, like a dying ember. The atmosphere in the room shifted, the heavy silence replaced by a faint, distant hum of city noise, filtering through the still-open wall, a reminder of the world they had momentarily left behind. The portal was closing. Their time in the heart of the city's memory was ending.
"We need to get out of here, Erian," Harrow said, his voice grim, his gaze sweeping the now-fading chamber, a profound understanding in his eyes. He didn't question the psychic attack, the vanished body, or the blood-drawn spiral. He just accepted it, his pragmatism finally shattered by the irrefutable, horrifying truth of Draekall's living, breathing consciousness.
They scrambled back through the opening, the green-glowing spiral clutched in Erian's hand, its new, ancient hum a stark contrast to the familiar beat of his own frantic heart. As they exited the chamber, the seamless wall behind them slowly began to re-form, the crack sealing itself with an almost imperceptible groan of shifting steel, erasing all trace of their passage. The eerie quiet of the tunnel system returned, but now it felt like a temporary reprieve, a fragile bubble before the storm.
They ascended the narrow, dusty stairwell, their footsteps echoing loudly in the oppressive quiet, each step a testament to their miraculous escape. As they emerged back into the grimy service corridor, the faint glow of Draekall's streetlights seeped in from a distant vent, painting the scene in bruised purples and dull greys, a stark reminder of the city's unyielding nature. The air above ground felt colder, sharper, filled with a renewed sense of danger.
Just as they reached the service door leading out to the alley, Erian's phone buzzed in his pocket, a sudden, jarring vibration. He pulled it out, his fingers trembling. It was a message. Not from a known contact. The sender ID was a series of chaotic, non-repeating numbers, an unknown source. A new message. A new threat.
The text was stark, chillingly precise, its words burning themselves into his mind:
"YOU'VE BROKEN CYCLE 8. ONLY TWO REMAIN."
Erian stared at the words, his mind reeling. Cycle 8. What did that mean? A sequence? A phase in the city's awakening? A countdown? And "only two remain." Two more cycles of murder? Two more victims before the city… fully awakened? Or fully died? Or two more stages of discovery before the entire system collapsed, taking Draekall with it? The stakes had just been raised to an unimaginable level. He was not just investigating a crime; he was playing a dangerous game with the fate of Draekall itself, a city that was now revealed to be a living, breathing entity.
Another buzz. A new message. This one from Nina. His heart leaped into his throat, a cold, sickening lurch.
"Rhett's missing. I think he found something he wasn't supposed to."
The world tilted. Rhett. His friend. His anchor in the storm. The one who was supposed to be safe, navigating the less-patrolled routes, the one who always had a plan, a joke, a way to lighten the darkest moment. He had gone missing. Not just gone, but missing in a way that screamed of the same silent, terrifying abduction as the third victim. He had stumbled onto something. The Censors had found him. Or worse, the city itself had claimed him, pulling him into its labyrinthine depths.
Erian looked at the green-glowing spiral in his hand, then at the sealed wall behind them, the silent tomb of Draekall's memories, now hidden once more. He was embroiled in a war for consciousness, a war with no rules, no boundaries, where reality itself was a shifting illusion. The city was alive. And it was hungry. And his friends, the only people he had left, were now caught in its deadly, spiraling embrace.